Similarly, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s Global Green project in the Lower Ninth Ward’s Holy Cross neighborhood has five low-energy homes. And the Pontchartrain Park Neighborhood Association, organized by actor Wendell Pierce, also is aiming to rebuild with solar and geothermal energy in every home. Global Green’s homes are estimated to be 70-90 percent more energy efficient, and Make It Right estimates that its homes are 70 percent more efficient. Learn More

Even parts of the Louisiana business community—long a bastion of the oil and gas industry—may be seeing the light. Beth Galante, executive director of the New Orleans office of the nonprofit Global Green USA, sees this shift within the business community as "winning a major battle in the war" to sway local public opinion. "To get a chamber of commerce that is dominated by one of the most conservative oil and gas industries in the country to invest time and money in green energy is huge," she argues. Learn More

As the climate change summit meeting moves forward in Copenhagen, it is increasingly clear that more than just the environment is at stake. The global environmental crisis is at the heart of practically all the problems now confronting us, including the need to create a global economic model grounded in the public good. Learn More

"This wasn't just folks with a bunch of good ideas and a Hollywood star"Global Green USA, a charity founded in 1993 by Mikhail Gorbachev, may be best known for its initiatives with celebrities like Leonardo di Caprio. But far from the glare of Hollywood, the group has done some of its most important work in New Orleans. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, Global Green began rebuilding a community meant not only to improve the lives of residents but to inspire other green construction around the country. Learn More

The resulting house is a fine example of what you might call the Better Living Through Modern Green Design strain of utopianism, whose adherents argue that contemporary design and technology will conspire to free us from our grim, polluted past and usher in an era of efficiency and cleanliness. And I have to say, it’s an appealing future. Several days a week, the Global Green house opens for tours, and it’s hard not to marvel at all the applied ingenuity, from the dual-flush toilets—number one gets a spritz, number two more hydraulic vigor—to the “green screen” of Carolina jasmine being trained to shade the south wall, to the thousand-gallon cistern intended to supply captured rainwater for toilet-flushing and plant care . The house is designed to be “net zero” energy-wise—that is, it produces as much electricity as it consumes each year. Learn More

No organization is doing more to green New Orleans than Global Green USA, the American arm of the international environmental organization that was founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That begins with the Holy Cross project, an entire sustainable village being built in the city's flood-damaged Lower Ninth Ward, with the help of Home Depot's corporate foundation. Eventually the village will include five sustainable homes, along with an 18-unit green apartment building and a community center. Learn More